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The ever increasing complexity of aerospace design has seen the emergence of Aerospace Design Automation, the study of design of aircraft/aerospace vehicle design systems. Our previous publications have dealt with its foundation, the Aerospace Design Representation Programming Interface (AERO-DRPI). To model the design, process and status data the AERO-DRPI uses data schemas appropriate for a tool and data combination. A data schema enables the definition of semantics and syntax of design, status, and process data. For generic design management, a data schema is required on which all the generic operations are possible. It should also meet all the requirements for generic design management. The generic design management schema should be extendible with minimum data redundancy. A specific design management data schema uses the generic design management schema as its foundation. For a specific design sub-discipline there are specific schemas.

Interfacing mechanisms of existing programming interfaces (PIs) could be applied to an Aerospace Design Representation Programming Interface (AERO-DRPI). Therefore it is necessary to study representative PI(s) to examine their features and their potential influence on specifying an AERO-DRPI. In our view the abstraction level of functionality categorizes interfacing mechanisms into three types. The first provides fundamental interfacing functionality that is reused by other types of interfaces. The second provides generic design management interfacing functionality and the third provides specific design management interfacing functionality. Representative PI(s) are analyzed by examining how well they meet our AERO-DRPI requirements. From this analysis we extract important characteristics of PI mechanisms that could be applied to an AERO-DRPI.

In our view the impact of software engineering technology on aircraft design methodology is often not recognized by the aircraft design community. Therefore new software engineering technology is often not used and therefore a new aircraft design methodology cannot emerge. We analyze the conventional aircraft design methodology, the design systems used to realize this methodology and the software engineering technology used to realize the aircraft design systems. We present the limitations of the conventional aircraft design methodology and explain how this is effected by the conventional software engineering technology. We then present a new aircraft design methodology and explain the impact of new software engineering technology on its realization. This analysis explains how new engineering information needs differ from the capabilities provided by the conventional information systems as applied to conceptual aircraft design.